Saturday, April 27

6:45 a.m. -7:45 a.m. Morning Yoga (pre-registration required, $15 per person)

6:45 a.m.-8:30 a.m. Breakfast (Moose's Nook open until 10 a.m.)

8:00 a.m.-8:30 a.m. Registration Desk open

E1 8:45 a.m.-10:00 a.m. Keynote speaker - Yvonne Camus

10:00 a.m.-1:15 p.m. Exhibits open

10:00 a.m.-10:45 a.m. Coffee break and time to visit the Exhibits

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m. Registration Desk open

10:45 a.m.-11:45 a.m. Conference Sessions

F1. Alberta Wide Borrowing - Kerry Anderson and Wendy Sears Ilnicki
This province-wide initiative will allow library clients to use all Alberta public libraries as if they were in their home library. This change in practice is exciting yet nerve-wracking at the same time. This session will provide a panel of library personnel that have successfully managed increased traffic with new workflows and lived to tell the tale.

F2. Dewey Divas Present: Best Adult Books for Spring/Summer 2013 - Rosalyn Steele, Lahring Tribe and Tim Armstrong
What's new in Adult Books for Spring/Summer 2013? Representatives from the Dewey Divas & Dudes present their favourite new books for adults releasing in early 2013.

F3. Strong and Important Ties - Popular Culture and the Library - Gail de Vos
This session will explore how the inclusion of popular culture will strengthen ties with the community, and how and where to find the trend-setting and enticing items to persuade patrons to continually return to the library, and to consider it an important aspect of their life, be it a public, school or academic library. Popular Culture can be defined as whatever people in your community are interested in, including music, movies, magazines, television shows, websites, apps, fads, celebrities and much more. Find the trend-setting and enticing items nationally or locally!

F4. How to Listen to Customers: Using Research and Assessment to Improve Customer Experience - Laura Winton 
This presentation will explore a variety of ways libraries can listen to their customers and how to collect and use customer experience data, no matter what your library’s size, location, or objectives. Using examples from Edmonton Public Library’s recent and ongoing customer experience projects, the Customer Experience Intern Librarian will lead attendees through the various steps in customer-driven research, including how to ask the right questions, where and how to gather evidence, and what to do with that evidence once it has been gathered.

F5. Community Based Planning: If You Build it With Them, They Will Support You - Colleen Schalm and Susan Grieshaber-Otto 
Successful libraries find their niche in the community: they are able to identify relevant community needs and adapt their services and spaces to meet those needs. Learn how several central Alberta libraries have successfully applied principles from Strategic Planning for Results to develop locally inspired plans of service, foster relationships with funders, create community alliances, and strengthen staff relationships as they developed and implemented their action plans.

F6. Building Bridges Across Alberta: Four Post-Secondary Institutions Collaborating to Create an Information Literacy Assessment Tool - Jessica Knoch, Nancy Goebel, Michelle Edwards Thomson, Sara Sharun 
Four Alberta post-secondary institutions are working together on a pilot project to create and implement an information literacy assessment tool. Join us as we discuss the creation and implementation of the assessment tool, share our early findings about basic information literacy skills held by post-secondary students in Alberta, and explore the benefits this collaboration has had on our home libraries.

F7. RISE-ing to Break Down Barriers Through Collaboration, Partnership and Programming - Lauren Jessop and Denise Fung 
The RISE Network is a partnership between three regional library systems in Alberta which installed video conferencing equipment in all of their 79 libraries. APLEN and the PLSB are working with the RISE Network partners on a pilot project to expand the RISE Network to the rest of Alberta through the APLEN Nodes libraries. With the pilot project more than half way to completion, Consultant Librarians from the RISE Network will share ways in which RISE has built stronger working relationships among diverse communities and enabled libraries to engage library staff and residents in innovative programming and learning across the miles; all while saving money and time.

F8. The Partnership: What is in it for Me? - Lou Duggan, Colleen Murphy, Susan Cleyle 
The Partnership is Canada's national network of provincial and territorial library associations. This session will include an overview of The Partnership, its history and the successful initiatives that make up many of the services offered by LAA, and positively impact your professional development.

F9. The Library as the Heart of the Community - Myron Nebozuk and Peter Bailey 
This session will look at built solutions around the world that have helped libraries to re-engage with and become the focus of their respective communities. Your presenters will also go beyond physical solutions to discuss processes that can inspire current library patrons and generate new library champions.

F10. Better Together: Making the Most of Community Partnerships - Heather Robertson 
As libraries (particularly public libraries) continue to evolve into community hubs, the community partnerships that we develop become more complex and require different tools to manage them.  This session will share practical and adaptable tips, tools and staffing strategies used by the Calgary Public Library to make the most of community partnerships. It will also showcase how partnership opportunities, such as the Sun Life Financial Arts and Culture Pass, enable a library to achieve something it could not on its own and to meet the lifelong learning needs of customers in unique ways.

11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Lunch

1:15 p.m. Exhibits close

1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. Conference Sessions

G1. Public Library Services Branch Update - Diana Davidson, Bonnie Gray, Grant Tolley
The Public Library Services Branch (PLSB) works with libraries to ensure that Albertans have access to the resources and services of the provincial network of 316 public library service points.  PLSB provides over $26 million of funding assistance to 225 municipal and seven regional library boards, and more than $5 million to support resource-sharing, SuperNet connectivity and provincial library organizations.  The branch works closely with library staff, library board trustees, municipal councilors, the Alberta Public Library Electronic Network (APLEN), and The Alberta Library (TAL) consortium.  This session will bring you up to date on initiatives now underway at the Public Library Services Branch. 

G2. PREZI - Your Virtual Tour (Presentation) Tool - Lisa Weekes and Michelle Camelford
Medicine Hat Public Library’s Project Team of Michelle and Lisa will share the design and implementation process for their Virtual Tour project using PREZI with the hope of inspiring participants to design their own library virtual tours (and possibly other projects) using this free web tool. Virtual tours provide effective on-line exposure for current audiences and attracting potential users.

G3. See It, Own It, Fix It: Leading From Any Position at EPL - Karla Palichuk, Gerry O’Riordan
In 2009, Edmonton Public Library embarked on a significant staff training initiative called: Leading from Any Position (LFAP).  This initiative challenges staff at all levels to think about their jobs differently – how can we be stronger together and serve our communities better? In this session, you will hear the LFAP experience at EPL, including why we chose this direction, how managers support the program and how staff are responding to it.

G4. Community Collaboration: Building a Better Library Through Collaborative Management, Board and Municipal Relationships - Rachelle Kuzyk and Patricia Macquarrie
To create a successful environment, collaboration is required at all levels of library services. Library staff must work with library management, who, together with their library board, must in turn deliver library service at a standard of excellence with the support of their municipality. Successful municipal, board and management relations create a foundation of cooperation, initiative, and growth. This foundation creates an environment of success for management and staff in delivering passionate, positive library service.  The final product, exemplary service delivery, results in community support, participation, and use.

G5. Peer Roamers, Students Helping Students - Susan Beatty
Peer roamers at the Library, bringing learning to their colleagues! Learn how the University of Calgary Library and Student Success Centre worked together to set up a new program for learning support using student workers. Outcomes and the lessons learned along the way will be discussed.

G6. Effective Team Transitions - Sarah McCormack and Tamara Van Horne
Over the past year the Brooks Public Library has undergone many types of transition. In this session, staff from Brooks Public Library will discuss experiences dealing with key staff transitions and change management, and share effective strategies for your own workplace.

G7. New Wine into Old Wineskins: Re-purposing OPAC for Patron-Driven Acquisitions - Anton Chuppin
The concept of patron-driven acquisitions promises to be of great help in library collection development. Public libraries could benefit from it by establishing a closer collaboration with their patrons on the one hand and with their vendors on the other. In Shortgrass Library System we used our old OPAC to create an online interface through which our patrons can submit their suggestions for purchase based on the titles in our vendors catalogues.

G8. Teen Afterschool Programming and the Public Library - Elizabeth Coates
Through the use of community partnerships, the Forest Lawn branch of the Calgary Public Library has succeeded in providing teens with a daily afterschool program including a space to “hang-out” and enjoy a fun activity related to general interests such as yoga, a Hunger Games club, zumba, meeting a WWE superstar, or taking a First Aid certification course.  Learn how to start up and run a Teen Afterschool program in a public library setting with particular attention to finding and working with community partners in order to appeal to a teen audience, reduce costs, and increase marketing efforts.

G9. Beyond the Bestsellers - Colleen Brown, Linda Hall 
We know bestsellers fly off the shelves, but what about the rest of our library collections? What can we do to ensure that more of the library materials that we spend our budgets on are used, especially as ebooks gain in popularity?  We’ll share strategies learned through experience and experimentation, including some learned through Rachel Van Riel’s Opening the Book interActive online training, which we’ve used to try to entice people into borrowing from all areas of the collection.

G10. Step Into the Big Picture – Positioning Your Library to Embrace Its Potential - Michelle Toombs and Maggie Macdonald 
Sometimes we have to act fast, and sometimes we have to hurry up and wait.  That is how it is when leaders position their libraries to embrace a new way of delivering service.  By seeing how  public libraries, large and small, have much in common and even more to share, by having big ideas and by aligning ourselves with the right people, we can make steady progress toward achieving an ambitious goal.

2:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m. Coffee break

3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. Conference Sessions

H1. Library Trustee Board Basics - Patricia McNamee, Kerry Anderson and Ken Feser 
To be effective, library trustees need to understand the Alberta library environment. Legal compliance, roles and responsibilities, relationships with other organizations, efficiency and effectiveness are all vital to the success of the library board. As a trustee, do you sometimes wonder if you have all the basic knowledge you need to fulfill your role?

H2. Dewey Divas Present: Best New Children's & Young Adult Books for Spring 2013 - Rosalyn Steele and Lahring Tribe
Representatives from the Dewey Divas & Dudes present their favourite new books for children and teens releasing this summer! Discover new authors, find out about hot trends in children's book publishing and get a head start on your selecting for Summer 2013.

H3. Fostering Positive Library-Municipal Relations - Ian McCormack 
Your library and your municipal council are getting along great. How do you keep it that way? You're not getting along? Well, how do we fix it then? This session will explore practical examples of how to create a positive two-way relationship and keep it that way.

H4. Mutually Beneficial: Partnerships and Processes in Building a Unique Digitized Collection - Leanne Drury Melsness, Peter Schoenberg, Nicole Dalmer, Debbie Feisst 
In celebration of the library’s centennial in 2013, Edmonton Public Library wanted to create an engaging and interactive digital representation of the library’s history with citizens as the primary audience. The H. T. Coutts Education Library wanted to increase access to its unique learning resources, current and historical. Both of these digitization and discovery system projects required many players and partnerships to make their resources available. Learn how these projects were implemented and have the potential to become the launching points for longer term collaboration, a larger vision, and bigger possibilities.

H5. Fire that Volunteer: Reinventing Volunteers in the 21st Century - Nicholas Spillios 
Staff, trustees and Friends of the Library must work together to provide leadership in the reinventing of volunteers. The views of staff and volunteers on the role of volunteers must be considered in light of research and studies conducted by Volunteer Alberta, Volunteer Canada, the American Library Association as well as a review of the activities of Friends groups across Canada by the Friends of Canadian Libraries. This session will attempt to bring a better understanding to this very important group which can provide essential support to the delivery of library services. We can truly be stronger together.

H6. How Libraries Have Changed the Conversation about Early Childhood - Line Marie Perron, Laurel McCalla 
In the last three years, the Early Childhood Development Mapping Project has been working on mobilizing communities across the province to support discussions around how Alberta’s young children are doing prior to entering kindergarten.  Pivotal to those conversations have been the strengths, insights and resources contributed by local libraries.  The inclusive, strength based and collaborative approach used by libraries to support children and families locally has become a model that has informed discussions across the province.  We will highlight some of the ways in which libraries have shaped the way in which communities have responded to their youngest citizens.

H7. Stronger Together - The Power of Three - Kris Samraj, Petra Mauerhoff and Shelley Ross 
Libraries in Southeastern Alberta have a history of working well together. Over the past year, the library directors of Medicine Hat College, Medicine Hat Public Library, and Shortgrass Library System took their relationship to the next level and started partnering on several new initiatives that have been of great benefit to their communities.

H8. Conversations with Great Minds: Innovation in Libraries - Robin Thiessen-Hepher, Mary Medinsky 
How do you learn the secrets of the most innovative librarians working in the field today? Why, you ask them, of course! Presenting the findings of our interviews with some of libraryland's leading lights, we show what motivates and inspires their creativity and success, with plenty of takeaways for you to take back to your staff!

H9. Yes! Social Media is for All Libraries - Wendy Hodgson-Sadgrove  
Libraries by their very nature are social and evolving communities. Social media is about sharing and who better to do it than your library. This is Westlock Libraries successful journey into social media. Discover how, why, the techniques and the positive outcomes this rural library gained from embracing and maintaining its social virtual presence. Learn ways to enhance your outreach through Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, blogs  and how to embrace social networking software.

H10. Stronger Together: Connecting Online for Lifelong Professional Development - Joanne de Groot, Jennifer Branch  
This session will provide participants with an overview of ways to access just in time or do it yourself online professional development. The focus of the session will be on how to get started with just in time professional development, how to build and maintain a personal learning network, and the types of informal and formal learning opportunities that currently exist for library staff and trustees in Alberta's public, school, and academic libraries. There will be opportunities for questions and discussion, and an extensive guide to online professional development resources will be available for participants.

6:00 p.m. Closing Dinner and Social

L1 8:00 p.m. Author Talk: Todd Babiak

L2 8:00 p.m. Wine Tasting

L3 9:00 p.m. Dance

Printable Saturday Program

Click here for a PDF version of the Saturday schedule.